Today former US Treasury official, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, spoke with King World News about why the coming collapse will be so horrific. Dr. Roberts also warned about the lies and corruption which are now engulfing the U.S., as well as how this is beginning to impact the way other countries around the world view Washington. Below is what Dr. Roberts had to say in this powerful interview

Eric King: “When you say 2014 will be the year of reckoning for the United States, how bad will it get here, in your opinion?”

Dr. Roberts: “It could get very bad, particularly as American prestige has taken such hard hits -- not just in Ukraine, but also with the announcement by the retiring prosecuting attorney of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He announced that his prosecutions of Goldman Sachs and other mega-banks had been squelched by the political people at the top of the SEC because ‘they were more focused on getting high-paying jobs after their government service than on bringing cases.’....

“In other words, he said the top people at the SEC were protecting the banks from the SEC prosecutors in order to get big positions in the banks when they left the government service. Well, this shows total corruption (laughter ensues) of all the regulatory agencies. I’m sure it’s like that in every regulatory agency.

So this is a tremendous blow to a government that bases its credibility on claims that it’s against corruption, it’s for democracy, human rights, justice, etc., when you have the prosecuting attorney saying they don’t let us bring cases against criminals because they are counting on being paid off. The implications of this are tremendous.

Of course the other bad hit has come from all of the really reckless propaganda that has come out of Washington about Ukraine. First they said, ‘Russia had invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea.’ Well, the whole world found out rather quickly that was just another lie.

Then they said the Russians were ‘massing troops on the Ukrainian border,’ and they showed these photographs of all these Russians massed on the Ukraine border. It turns out these were photographs taken from last year’s military maneuvers and that the military maneuvers included units of the Ukrainian Army because at the time Ukraine and Russia were hand-in-hand. So there were caught in that lie.

... And the Russians, under the threat of sanctions, have said, ‘We’re tired of this bullying. We’re just removing ourselves from the system. We’re not going to play with them anymore.’ (Laughter ensues) So there you have a major blow to the petrodollar.

... So, yes, this is likely to be a year of tremendous problems for Washington. The only people who can bail Washington out are the Russians and Chinese. If Washington survives all the crises that it has created for itself, it will simply be due to the mercy of the Russians and the Chinese, who refuse to exploit the advantages that Washington has so foolishly given them.

Now can a government that stupid deal with the kinds of crises or potential crises that we’ve outlined in this interview? I don’t think it can.”